Coconut Chicken with Roasted Carrot-Ginger Puree

Last week, I was walking to work and I noticed that some of the trees were getting little leaf buds on them! I was so excited... and then the next day, it snowed. And snowed. And snowed. Three feet of snow later, I decided a meal with warm, tropical flavors might be just the thing I needed to cheer myself up.

A roasted carrot and ginger soup from an old issue of Food + Wine caught my eye recently, but Shawn wasn't buying the whole carrot soup idea. To be honest, I'm still a little tired of soup myself anyway. Since we both like mashed carrots, I decided to reinvent the soup as a roasted carrot and ginger puree. Coconut seemed like it would go well with those flavors and I was in the mood for something a little different, so I decided to make coconut chicken cutlets.

Although I could have used to roast the carrots a little longer (you can see that they're a little gritty in the photos - that's because they were undercooked), I was really happy with how these two dishes turned out. The sweetness of the carrot was great with the ginger and the coconut on the chicken got nice and toasty and made the perfect crispy coating. I used boneless chicken thighs, which have a lot more flavor and are a lot juicer than breast meat. Plus if you buy thighs with the skin on and just take it off yourself, it's so much cheaper than buying boneless, skinless breast! [....]